


Most Painful, Patient Care

by the_ragnarok



Category: Hellraiser (Movies), Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Ableism, Additional Warnings Apply, Alternate Universe - Magic, Bathing/Washing, Body Horror, Caretaking, Creepy, Creepy Fluff, Graphic Description, Graphic description of torture, M/M, Moral Dilemmas, Physical Disability, Stockholm Syndrome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-04
Updated: 2015-10-04
Packaged: 2018-04-24 17:35:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4928857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_ragnarok/pseuds/the_ragnarok
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John receives the little black box from Harold, who owns a shop that wasn't there yesterday. Then Harold takes him in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Most Painful, Patient Care

**Author's Note:**

> My eternal thanks to immoral_crow, whose reactions kept me writing this against all the odds <333
> 
> PLEASE NOTE: this work features a LOT of triggery content, not all of which is in the tags. Please take care, and if you need to ask about any specific triggers, feel free to email me at theragnarokd at gmail. <3

The sign on top of the antique shop says _Lark's_ , in understated gold plate. It seems a classy kind of place. Not John's first pick, by a long shot, but the door is open and there are tables and chairs inside, and maybe he can delay freezing to death for another day.

Kind of useless, really. If only John could bring himself to stop moving, his body would probably realize it ought to be dead on its own. He can't, though. The credo might have well been written into his bones: _Survive, escape, do damage._ There's no escape for him, and nothing left to damage other than himself, so he figures one out of three is okay.

John doesn't see anyone when he walks inside, neither customers nor staff. He sits down at a table and shuts his tired eyes. When he opens them, there's a steaming cup of tea next to him. The table is still vacant. John picks up the cup and sips, examining his surroundings.

The store, despite being tightly packed with merchandise, isn't cluttered. Things are laid neatly on shelves, each with a discreet little plaque bearing a price that could probably pay for John's meals for a month. Nothing seems shabby, or mass-produced. Even the tables and chairs are each unique, made of heavy wood and embroidered cloth. John almost feels bad for sitting on one: he's probably desecrating a priceless antique with his ass. 

He's been rendered all but numb to guilt, though, as well as most other emotions. 

Right in front of him there's an ornate little wooden box about the size of a Rubik's cube. It's covered in gold leaf design, and John's hands itch to pick it up and play with it. He was never a huge puzzle buff, but it seems like an interesting sort of challenge.

Someone comes hobbling to him. He avoids the shelves and furniture without looking, familiar with the place, and John prepares himself to be ousted by this man, who's probably the owner.

Instead, he sits in front of John, carefully putting down a cup of tea identical to the one John's holding. They're fine china, from the same set as far as John could tell. The man says, "I see this caught your eye," and he hands him the small cube.

John flinches away. "I can't pay for it."

The man blinks at him. "I know." After a short, awkward silence, he goes on as if nothing happened. "The Lament Configuration. It has an interesting history, actually - I received it from a man, several years ago, who claimed it gave him all sorts of visions. Among other things. Only when solved, of course, and as you'd imagine it's a fairly complicated puzzle."

"Convenient, that." John's voice is rusty with lack of use.

The man gives him a small smile. "I thought so. Would you like more tea?"

Out of sheer curiosity, John says yes. The man takes the cup and returns it full and steaming. The bell at the door rings, and the man gives John an apologetic nod and goes to greet the new customer. John takes three sips of his tea and waits for the man to disappear among the shelves before escaping. 

~~

Outside a liquor store, John reaches inside his pocket and finds several crisp hundred dollar bills he didn't remember putting in there. And something else. The coat is a good one, thick and lumpy with multiple deep pockets. John unzips enough to reach an inner pocket, one he felt bulging when he grabbed for cash. There's a hard, square shape inside, and John is both surprised and not to find the cube he was eyeing at the store.

The owner's notion of charity, perhaps? An odd one, indeed, when John probably couldn't sell this or use it to survive on the streets. How did he reach inside John's coat to place it there when John hadn't taken it off during his stay? It would have fit in the outside pocket along with the bills.

It's getting late, though, and John's head hurts. He wants a drink, and for once, he can afford one. He goes in to buy a bottle, then steps outside in search of a warm place to sleep it off.

~~

At the motel, John takes off his coat, placing the bottle of cheap whiskey and the Lament Configuration on the table next to the bed. He stares at the two of them. He wants that drink so goddamned bad. That same urge, though, that need to go on, is clawing at him. He can't quite make himself believe that he's capable of getting up and smashing that bottle, but small steps are possible. He won't take a drink for the next five minutes. Five minutes, he can do.

As a distraction, he picks up the cube. It seems like one solid block of wood. He turns it around and around, tracing a finger over its designs, looking for an irregularity, a catch. He doesn't find one, but he does like the feel of it. He keeps doing it, idly turning it in his hands.

He must press something, somehow, because the box comes open.

Once it does, John starts seeing possibilities. He could press here, and see what happens. Push there. Twist this, or pull that. Most of his actions yield no response, the surface of the cube maintaining its impenetrable gloss, but every now and then something moves, and every time it does, it fills John with new ideas. He finds an enjoyment in it that he hasn't felt in a long time.

Then he makes one final twist, and the box _shudders_. Its top opens by itself. John stares, fascinated, waiting for a cuckoo or whatever to come out.

What comes out isn't a cuckoo.

John's first thought when he sees them is that he needs a drink. Not the visceral need that hits him in the gut whenever he goes without for more than a few hours. This is the sudden knowledge that he wasn't paying attention, and now not only is he going through withdrawal, he's hallucinating.

Because they can't be real, the... things? People? He's seeing. The one closest to him has a hole in his throat, with what is presumably his esophagus sticking out, leading to a bloated stomach and intestines before curling back into his body via a hole in the base of his stomach. John is a little concerned, in a theoretical sort of way, about what will happen if that digestive system catches on one of the hooks sticking out from the ribs of the figure next to.... him? Her? That?

Another one of them smiles at John. Given that its eye sockets are empty and the space between them is cleared of bone, flesh and skin, leaving a hollow rough spheroid in the middle of its face, it's an incongruously sweet smile. "Hello," it tells John, in a voice that could be feminine or masculine, and is fairly pleasant either way. "Welcome."

"You're in my room," John points out, in case the hallucination missed that.

"We know." It beckons another hallucination close. It opens its rib cage like closet doors, showing taut lungs hanging precariously above an array of wicked-looking knives. "Be still, please."

John finds he can't move. He's not surprised by this. This must be like one of those , what are they called, sleep paralysis situations. The trick to those, he remembers, is to keep your eyes closed and try to move, a little bit at a time.

The pain is a surprise, lancing through his forearm. Probably another effect of withdrawal. Shit. John should have prepared for this better. Still, maybe it's for the best. Maybe this is how he finally dies.

"Look," a voice says. John ignores it, until his eyelids are pried open, something pricking at the corner of the left one. He yells when he feels a stabbing sensation, then a rough _pull_ forcing the lid up; he realizes what it is when he sees the needle and thread coming at his eye again, blurry through tears.

"I'm looking," he says, voice only cracking a little, and the hand holding the needle lets it drop. John tries not to focus on how the weight of it pulls the thin skin of his eyelid down even as the single stitch keeps it up, the friction of the thread against his eyeball.

Instead he looks at his arm, laid open from forearm to fingertips. Only the thumb and index finger are longer than they should be. He realizes what's happening when he sees the knife cutting up muscle and sinew in his middle finger, separating soft tissue from bone and laying it out long and limp.

Bile rises in his throat. He struggles, or would if he could so much as twitch. There are noises coming out of him now, low animal sounds. The hand that tried to stitch his eyes open touches his hair briefly; when John looks up, he sees that its owner has nails in its own eyes, holding them in place, and a mouth sewed into a tight pucker. It gestures in the direction of John's hand, and John looks where he's bidden.

It's a long, long time before they're done with his hands. Then they move to his legs, where they take skin to cover the new length of his fingers, and cut off the remaining exposed flesh. John passes out then, coming awake to see the figures having a silent debate while looking at his jaw.

They leave it alone, instead cutting along his elbows and his knees, his shoulders and the tops of his thighs. John can't see what they're doing very well.

Then the last stitch is pulled, and each figure with a mouth capable of smiling does, and they walk off into thin air, the last one pausing to pull the thread out of John's eyelid.

Limp on the bed, panting, John tries to turn over. At the first contact between his shoulder and the mattress, he opens his mouth to scream and blacks out before any sound leaves him.

~~

John blinks up at the ceiling. He barely dares to even try and move. The memory of pain is too fresh. He's aching all over, now, and nauseated. 

There's drink on the bedside table. That memory spurs him to try and move, just to scrub at his face.

When he sees what's left of his fingers, he really does scream.

He quickly finds out he can't shift his body. Any attempt sends such stomach-clenching pain through his system that he gives up. He stares up, eyes throbbing in the fluorescent light.

So this is it. He'll die of thirst, probably, wallowing in his own filth. It may be the saddest part of this is that he can think of worse ways to go.

Even now, though, he can't give up. He tests his limits. Bands of pain surround his torso, too strong to let him turn around. His arms and legs offer him no leverage: no wonder, since the former look like they passed through a paper shredder and the latter have been whittled down below the knee to the thickness of his large toe. He can move his upper arms, and his thighs, but any attempt to lean on them is excruciating.

"Broken bone shards, probably," says a voice John almost recognizes. "No, don't tense the muscles." 

The warning comes too late. John's already hissing from his instinctive attempt to turn and see who's talking to him. 

"Here." There is an arm under his shoulders, just below the spot of fragile hurt John can feel simmering under his skin. John doesn't attempt to shift his weight away from it, and slowly it helps him sit up so that the change of position is only agonizing, not unbearable.

Now John can see. It's the man from the store. He supposes he shouldn't be surprised. "John Reese," he tells the man. "Sergeant major, two-oh-six-four-eight-nine."

"Pleased to meet you," the man says. "Harold Finch." 

Raising his eyebrow hurts, too, but a lot less than anything else does. John focuses on that. "Not Lark?"

"Some know me by that name," Finch-- Lark-- _Harold_ says, with equanimity. He moves aside, rolling up a wheel chair. "I will do my best, but this will probably hurt. I apologize in advance."

 _Hurt_ is an understatement. John stays conscious, but just barely. It doesn't leave him a lot of energy - or leverage - to fight Harold off. 

~~

Harold takes him back to the shop, rides with him in a small rickety elevator to the top floor. There's a single bed there, next to a window, and a work desk complete with a chair and a laptop. Harold carefully installs him in the bed and walks out.

John hardly has a chance to look around before Harold's back inside with a glass of clear liquid and a straw. John takes it. If Harold wants him dead or drugged, John is shit out of luck anyway.

It's just water, cool and slightly metallic on his tongue. John empties the glass, and the next one Harold fetches him.

Alongside it, there's a shot glass. John sniffs: vodka. He considers refusing that, just to see what happens.

"You can go off, as they say, 'cold turkey'." Harold doesn't make air quotes, but John hears them nevertheless. "I wouldn't recommend it, but that's up to you. I will bring you more to drink if you ask. If you don't, I will assume you want the amount of alcohol that will allow you to," he grimaces, "kick the addiction as quickly and painlessly as possible, and offer it to you accordingly."

John drinks.

"I was going to eat in two hours," Harold says once he put the glasses away. "I will bring something up for you. If you're hungry in the meanwhile, or need anything else," he nods to a small microphone beside the bed, "just say so, and I'll hear you."

John turns his head away. After a few moments, he hears Harold's footsteps, and the elevator humming its way down.

~~

John wasn't sure what to expect, in terms of lunch. He thought maybe a bowl of gruel, or a breakfast in bed. He wasn't expecting Chinese take-away still in the container, though maybe he should have.

Harold sits beside the bed, offering up a laden fork. John looks at it, mouth resolutely shut.

"If there's anything else you would like," Harold says, then his eyes widen. "You can still talk, can't you? I heard you." His mouth thins. "Although that's not necessarily an indication - sometimes they have such an _odd_ sense of humor...."

John waits to see if he'll say more, but Harold clams up and puts the fork down, moving to the table. He's tapping away on a tablet when John realizes he's probably trying to rig some sort of communication device. "I can talk," he says, leaving the _I don't choose to_ implied.

Harold relaxes visibly. "All right. Is the food not to your liking?" He gives John an expectant look.

It's a little too much to keep his stoic front. "None of this is to my liking," John snaps, "but especially not being _spoon-fed_ like a toddler."

"Fork-fed, technically." 

"Whatever." John really, really wishes he could throw something at him.

"I suppose I could feed you intravenously," Harold says, after a moment's silence. "Or via a tube."

"Or let me starve," John points out.

Harold's mouth thins, but he nods, acknowledging. Then he sits back down, loads the fork and offers it again.

John takes it. It's chicken with cashews, and it's not bad.

After the meal, Harold takes John's clothes off and washes him. He's gentle and impersonal, like the better class of nurse. He's also thorough, leaving only the little bands of skin surroundings the broken clumps of bone untouched. "Would you like a shave?" He says, at the end.

"Cut my hair, too, while you're at it," John says. His eyes are shut, have been since Harold began.

Once that's done, Harold inhales sharply, and says, "I regret to say that this will probably hurt," and touches the washcloth to the top of John's thigh.

It does. A lot. Harold moves through it as quickly as possible while John grinds his teeth.

~~

The room he's in is on a sort of gallery level, overlooking the main floor of the store. John people-watches.

All kinds of folks walk inside the store. Apparently Harold leaving a mug of tea for homeless visitors isn't an uncharacteristic kindness, and neither is him stuffing some money in their pockets while they nod off. He doesn't give them anything else that John can see.

The other patrons all get the same kind of treatment from Harold regardless of their apparent social status. That, as well as the fact that Harold can afford the kind of charity he showers on random bums, gives John the hint that he's independently wealthy. 

Harold never gives people the kind of sales pitch - or what John assumed was a sales pitch - that he gave John for the Lament Configuration. Harold is barely tolerant of people browsing his wares without knowing exactly what they're looking for, with a tendency to thaw out for people who seem drawn to anything in particular, although those are likely as not to leave the store without it.

When the store is empty, Harold will often sit up with John. He reads, or spends time on the computer, his fingers quick and nimble on the keyboard. When Harold suggests reading aloud, John nods agreement.

Harold's choice of reading material doesn't reveal much. He likes Dickens, and Asimov, and Lovecraft. He puts _The Shadow Out of Time_ down after the first three lines, though, with a sad shake of his head, and picks up _Pride and Prejudice_ instead.

John never liked Austen. "How long have you had the shop?" he asks.

Harold marks his place with a finger, which is ridiculous given that his place is one page in. "A while." He doesn't continue reading right away.

John racks his mind, trying to come up with a sufficiently sideways approach to asking. He's still cloudy with pain, though, and withdrawal, so he ends up being blunt. "Why am I here?"

Harold peers at him. "Did you have somewhere else to be?"

The question sounds sincere. Truth is, John doesn't. Probably Harold figured that out. "What do you want from me?"

Harold considers this. "Whatever you're capable of and willing to do."

That sounds like a come on if John ever heard one, except Harold only ever touches him in the context of cleaning him up, without so much as an untoward glance. "That's not much, right now," John says.

"I beg to differ," Harold says, and goes back to the book.

~~

"What was that?" John asks on another evening, when Harold is messing around with the laptop. "That book you wouldn't sell."

"Hmm? Oh." Harold shuts the laptop down and stands up. "Would you like to see?"

John wonders, when Harold is halfway to the door, what he'd do if John said no. He doesn't.

Once he's back up, sitting next to him, Harold holds the book in question out next to John's ruined fingers. "The texture is interesting. Shall I?" 

At John's nod, he lowers the book, rubbing it against the limp skin of John's fingers so that John can feel it. It's leather, very fine and very soft. John finds himself glancing at Harold's square hands, mentally comparing the sensation: the book doesn't have rough spots like Harold's hands do. There's some kind of creature embossed on the cover.

Harold takes it away, then produces some device. "This will let you turn pages, if you like." Once John expresses interest, Harold puts the device in his lap, placing the book inside it and placing a long stick in John's mouth that he can use to push the page turning button.

Now that John's looking at it closely, it's not exactly a book: more like a notebook, or a journal. There's something written inside. Handwritten, small and terse but legible. It's a spy thriller, a surprisingly good one that manages to be both realistic and engaging at the same time. John finishes the book and lets Harold take it away.

That the handwriting looked weirdly like John's own is the least of his concerns at the moment.

~~

Harold has the laden fork waiting for him, and suddenly it's too much, John can't take it for another second.

With a thrust of his shoulder, he knocks the fork away from Harold's hand, barely feeling the pain through the burst of mind-searing rage. "Fuck you," he snarls. 

Harold looks at him. Then he gets up, and cleans up the spilled food, and puts the rest of it on the desk away from John's reach. He can still smell it, and he's hungry, but he doesn't fucking care. He's glad when Harold leaves.

When Harold comes back a moment later, with a clean fork, John says, "What fucking part of fuck you was hard to understand?"

Harold stops. He says, "Call me if you need anything," still as calm as you'd like, and he takes the food away and leaves.

John spends a few minutes fuming before sinking back into the bed. The bone shards embedded in his skin bite, another reminder that this is futile. Even high on anger, John can't so much as make himself fall from the bed to the floor. He's too afraid of how much that would hurt.

Before, he thought he'd become something useless and disgusting. Turns out he didn't know the meaning of the words.

A few hours pass. Usually Harold comes up with a cup of tea for himself and offers one for John - lukewarm, of course. Can't have the cripple burning himself. This time, he stays away. John's ferociously glad, if hungry and thirsty.

Late in the afternoon, something crackles next to the microphone John speaks into to summon Harold. "I will need to come in to clean you," Harold said, voice unusually soft. "Is that alright?"

"No." John closes his eyes.

There's silence from the other end of the line. "Being dirty can't be pleasant for you. And I'm sure you're aware of the possible consequences to your health."

John gives a short, involuntary bark of laughter. "My health. What the fuck does that even mean?"

"It means that however much you dislike your current state," Harold snaps back, "bedsores can't possibly make it better."

The worst of it is, Harold's right. John can see the logical progression of events. He'll refuse attention, until he is starving, or until the thirst gets too bad, or until pain keeps him awake for too long. Then he'll ask for Harold's tender care, because John has already revealed himself not to have the strength of will to suppress his survival instincts. Asking for it now - or, hell, allowing it; not like Harold expects him to beg - will spare him pain.

He can't get himself to do it.

"May I come in?" Harold asks, subdued.

"It's your place. Do what you want." John turns his face away from the microphone, as much defiance as he can muster at the moment.

When Harold enters, he has the wheelchair with him. "It should have occurred to me earlier," he says. "I confess I'm strongly an indoors type of person, but even I feel the lack of the outside world after a while. Being cooped up in here has probably driven you to distraction."

John wants to snarl again, except just the proximity, the possibility of the wheelchair sends his heart leaping. Christ, he thinks, disgusted with himself all over again. He's like a dog, tail wagging at the sight of his leash.

Harold cleans him up first, as methodical and meticulous as ever. But then he puts John in the chair, the process just as painful as John remembered and so very worth it, drapes a blanket over him, and out they go.

The first sign that things are weird is, no pun intended, the one above the shop. It's still understated gold script over wood. But now, it says _Nightingale's_.

It's not just the sign. John's last memory of the outside world is of passing a real estate agency and a lawyer's office on his way to Harold's shop, the first place in a long afternoon's walk that offered him an opportunity to sit down and let his bones thaw. Now the street is littered with cafes and bookshops. Couples and families stroll over a wide sidewalk that was half torn away, the last John remembers, barely letting even him walk on it without crossing over asphalt. Now it's broad enough that a father pushing a baby carriage passes comfortably beside John, the cars still far enough away for peace of mind.

"Where are we?" John croaks. 

"Still in New York, I think." Harold sounds preoccupied, probably distracted by navigating the chair. "I haven't checked, but it's rare that we venture out of the city, and there's a quality to the people here...." he trails off.

John looks around them with hungry eyes, soaking up the sounds and the smells: car exhaust and food, occasional washes of perfume or beauty products or sweat. Harold's shop smells of old paper and wood polish. Harold himself uses some kind of subtle cologne that John can just barely smell when Harold leans very close, as he has to when cleaning John.

In front of them, a toddler pushes a plate away. It falls and breaks on the ground, spraying tomato sauce everywhere. The toddler starts shrieking, a bright painful sound. John winces.

"This is a bit much, isn't it?" Harold sounds rueful. "Usually the shop has better instincts. I suppose it didn't know I was planning an outing today." He moves them a little bit further away, and stops. "Would you like to continue, find somewhere quieter? Or go back?"

It's been a long time, and the very sunlight is making John's eyes hurt. He closes them and tilts his head upwards. "Not yet."

Harold doesn't answer, simply pushes him forward.

Slowly, the world grows quiet again. The chair crunches over uncertain gravel path, and the car noises are replaced with the aggressive tweeting of birds. Harold sits besides John on a bench and takes out a book. For once, he doesn't offer to read to him. After another moment, John closes his eyes again.

On the way back, Harold stops for a bit. John turns his head, following Harold's gaze. There's something odd about the building in front of which they stopped, a single brick that's a trapezoid instead of a rectangle. Then Harold keeps walking, without further explanation.

The shop is still there when they get back. The sign still says _Nightingale's_. John supposes he should be thankful for small mercies.

~~

John thinks he's getting an eye for the special merchandise. 

There's nothing unifying it, really, or setting it apart from the other stuff in the store. It'll be sitting on a shelf beside a hundred other items superficially like it. But every now and then, a client will come in, and-- not make a beeline for whatever the thing is. Watching them is like watching some half-blinded animal being herded, without even noticing. They'll start walking one way, suddenly go blank in the face, and turn right around, until they come face to face with whatever object liked them.

Probably John shouldn't assign human emotions to inanimate objects, except he's starting to have doubts about the _inanimate_ part.

He's watching one customer walk out, dazed, with a yellow-red egg-shaped rock in her backpack. She put it there, apparently without noticing. She leaves without so much as glancing at Harold - who, on his part, makes no attempt to stop her. John doesn't delude himself that noticed something that escaped Harold's attention.

Later, he asks, in attempt to distract himself from being cleaned. "You'll go out of business if you keep letting costumers take things without paying for them."

Harold makes no attempt to pretend obliviousness. "Who said she didn't pay?" His breath puffs on John's bare skin when he talks. "Raise your arm, please."

John complies, and says, "Does she have a tab open, that sort of thing?"

"That class of object," Harold says, hesitating on the last word, "isn't purchased with money."

"No?" Flippantly, John says, "So what, you trade your soul for it?"

Harold raises an eyebrow at him. "Have you been feeling particularly soulless, Mr. Reese?"

He has, actually, but that predates the box.

Harold must take John's silence as ceding the point. "They don’t pay. Or if one wants to be fanciful, one might say they pay with their lives."

At that, both of John's eyebrows rise. "So I'm supposed to be dead?" Maybe he's paying in installments.

"Certainly not!" Harold says, scandalized. "They pay with the lives they have afterwards. What they become."

John takes a while to digest this. "So basically, their souls."

"This conversation is entirely too metaphysical for me." Harold sounds grim. "Now raise your leg, if you would."

~~

The store is empty. Harold is tinkering with something at his desk. John stares at the wall and debates taking up a new hobby, like chewing the insides of his cheeks or competitive eye rolling.

Before he can get started on either, Harold turns to him, presenting the laptop's screen, unscrewed from the keyboard part. "I think I had... ah, here it is," he says, pulling some contraption from under the table. It seems to be some sort of metal frame, attached to a movable arm. Hope seizes through John, worse than the pain when he inadvertently tenses his muscles.

He remains as close to immobile as he can while Harold affixes the frame to the wall and puts the screen - which apparently functions as a sort of tablet on its own - in it, right where John can see it. "If you say _help_ or _eff one_ ," Harold says, "it will display the help menu for voice commands." Without further comment, he leaves the room.

The commands let him operate the browser and media files. Harold left him a good-sized collection of films. On a whim, John navigates to Netflix: Harold has an account logged in for John to use. He puts on an episode of _Orange is the New Black_ and considers his options. 

Harold will be able to hear anything John says, even if he'll stick to the polite fiction of privacy. At any moment, Harold can come up here and take the laptop away. John has to make the most out of this.

Fortunately, the tablet has a touch screen. He tries to sit up and reach it with his nose, gritting his teeth to suppress the hiss of pain as he moves. He can't reach it.

He looks around the room. Another stroke of luck: Harold left the screwdriver he used to affix the frame in place on the bed, on top of John's leg. If he's careful, if he arches his body in just the right way, he might be able to get it in his mouth and use it to tap the screen.

John heard it said that you can get used to anything that doesn't outright kill you. Maybe that's it, or maybe he's healing. Either way, when he shifts position to let the screwdriver roll, the pain is just short of unbearable. The screwdriver moves from his thigh to his belly. He bites his lip before leveraging his hips up to let it roll down his chest, tasting blood.

The screwdriver shifts to the left. At that moment John's body starts shaking, protesting the unnatural pause and the strain in his unused muscles, and the screwdriver starts on a descent towards the floor.

Before it can go that way, John leans right hard, flopping on his back again once the screwdriver has reached his solar plexus. For a few minutes, he lies there and breathes. Not too deep, as not to dislodge the screwdriver further. Just enough to get himself settled again.

He shoves his shoulders down into the bed, unable to hold back a grunt when the bone shards in his shoulders make themselves known. But the screwdriver is rolling, rolling, and John can't think about mistakes when he can almost taste the plastic handle, it's so close.

The radio next to his ear crackles to life. "Is everything alright?" Harold asks.

"Fine," John says, terse. "A little privacy, please?"

"Of course." The radio goes silent.

Well. He might as well make sure he has an alibi. He stops the show and searches for porn, instead: that should explain any odd noises and possible resulting injuries from moving too much. He briefly entertains the thought of choosing porn that would seem believable. What kind of porn would Harold think he likes? That leads him to wonder what Harold likes.

Really not the objective, but hey, anything might help. At this point, all he knows about Harold is that he's rich, owns a store that moves around apparently at random, and has a taste for quality tailoring. 

In the end, John searches for gay porn featuring older men, curious to see Harold's reaction. On the screen, a guy in a suit with salt-and-pepper hair ardently kisses a pretty blue-eyed man who's at least ten years younger than him. John mentally wishes them luck and turns to get the screwdriver in his mouth.

It takes a few tries, and by the time he succeeds, John is pathetically grateful for the cover of fake moans and slurping noises. He keeps the video on while poking the screen with the edge of the screwdriver.

His first goal, the browser history, gives him nothing. It's set not to save anything. John minimizes the browser. There's nothing on the desktop except a link to the home folder, which contains a number of directories. Most of these John dismisses for now as generic computer stuff. He ventures into the user directory.

It asks for a password. On the second failed attempt, John decides to look elsewhere.

There's a quick-launch program that gives him a list of the most recently used programs. A couple seem to be involved with the voice command driver, and another is the browser. After that, there's a spreadsheet application, which - miracle of miracles - opens a default password already entered. 

The last document there appears to be some sort of store inventory cum budget. A cursory glance tells John that he wasn't wrong about Harold being wealthy: the store is operating at a net loss, if what he's reading is representative, and Harold hasn't seemed the least bit perturbed about it when he looked at it - John checks the last-opened date - yesterday evening. 

(A part of John's mind tries to use this, to calculate how long he's been here. John shuts it off. That doesn't matter. The only thing knowing it can do is demoralize him.)

The browser falls silent. John carefully sets the screwdriver down and uses the voice interface to start another video.

There's one more spreadsheet, a grocery list that seems reasonable from what John knows of Harold's needs and his habits: shoe and furniture polish, personal hygiene products for two people, some extras to care for John's injuries and additional items that Harold probably bought just to be on the safe side. No food or cleaning items. Reasonable, as Harold seems to subsist on take away and probably dry cleans everything down to his underwear. 

The application used before it is some sort of drafting program that doesn't have the password already inputted, alas. John abandons that line of investigation and goes back to the browser, opening a new tab using the screwdriver.

A search for Harold Finch returns a few people that appear completely unrelated. Same for Harold Lark. Typing with the screwdriver on the touch keyboard is a pain, and John voice-orders another video while he thinks. On a whim, after considering some short bird names, he looks up Harold Wren.

The first result is some guy who ran an insurance company ten years ago. John almost dismisses it, until he notices the birth year in a side profile: the guy would be Harold's age, probably, and he graduated from MIT, which seems fitting. That's enough to get him to click the link.

There is no picture. Of course not. An image search yields nothing, which John thinks is curious in and of itself. Wren was a manager. Surely somebody had to take his picture at some company event and put it online. He goes back to the Wikipedia article, opening the edit history. There's not a lot there. Not many people care about the life of an insurance salesmen, however highly ranked. Some anonymous edits demanding citations, and one deletion.

John opens it. "Wren has been missing, presumed dead, since September 2001. He was last seen on September 9th by his secretary." The edit reason field says only "Speculation". 

John's jaw aches. He closes the tab and lets the screwdriver drop from his mouth.

With nothing to distract him, the sounds of the porn video catch his attention. They don't do much for him, the fake moans and the slap of skin on skin. Probably the people in the video just want their day to end. 

Harold might come in, and John should make this convincing, but right now the idea of being turned on seems as distant as the moon. He's tired and hurting and couldn't feel less like sex if he tried. It doesn't help that the very idea of thrusting makes him want to lock up with the knowledge of pain. He closes his eyes and orders the video closed.

A little while afterwards, Harold makes his way up. "Position change time," he tells John, maybe a little stiffer than he normally would. It's not unusual: Harold turns him over every now and then, to avoid pressure sores. This is about the usual time for it. It might have nothing to do with John's choice of distraction.

For a single moment, Harold's hands are hesitant when touching him. Then they go back to being assured as usual, gentle and impersonal, and John knows. The way Harold arranges him is slightly different as well: a pillow added just under John's hip, not something John needs for comfort but a way to get just enough leverage to achieve friction.

By the time Harold leaves, getting hard seems like a possibility. The whole thing is so ludicrous that John has to smother a laugh, the way Harold knows the limitations of John's body better than John himself does, the silliness of pretending not to know for the sake of - presumably - John's dignity, which was't anything to write home about even before his current infirmity. 

Even given the new position, John is exhausted. He closes his eyes and figures he'll get around to masturbating some other time.

His body - and his subconscious - have other plans.

John's had some fucked up dreams in his past. Probably an inevitability in a line of work that teaches one the best size of chunks to chop corpses into before tossing them in the river. This dream is... unusual.

He's dreamed about being cut up even before it was made into his horrifying reality. Since the fact, dreams where he's vivisected have become common. He has them two nights out of three. 

Usually it's the figures from the box working on him, or other similar ones. Now it's Harold, wielding the knife with the same concentrated look he had when fixing the computer, his hand bracing John's body the same way he does while cleaning him. 

And unlike the usual dreams, John is arching up towards the knife, letting the bone fragments in his shoulders and thighs pierce him from the inside even as Harold's knife penetrates his skin.

"Impatient," Harold chides him with a small smile. He doesn't remember seeing Harold smile in real life. It's a surprisingly sweet expression, especially given the droplets of blood staining his cheek. He cuts along John's abdomen and across to his hipbone, skin parting like opening a book to let the pages rustle.

Even in the dream it hurts. John knows it will hurt. He also knows he needs it.

He wakes up soiled with his own come, making some incoherent noise. The radio crackles. Harold's sleepy, "John?" goes unanswered.

Harold arrives within less than a minute. He cleans the spunk off John with the exact same touch he uses to clean his piss and sweat and shit. Then he wipes John's tears with that same touch, saying nothing.

~~

The next morning, Harold walks into the room with a new wheelchair. This one has an engine, and a control pad. John can steer it by moving his chin.

"I'm afraid you'll still need assistance to get in and out," Harold says, "and I'd advise you against leaving the store alone in case it spontaneously relocates, but at least you'll have free run of the premises."

He helps John into it without waiting for him to ask. The little frisson of gratitude feels like self-betrayal.

They're on the shop's main floor when Harold adds, "There's no need to resort to snooping. If there's anything you want to know, ask. I won't lie to you."

John just bets he won't. He's going to keep his eyes open, in any case. He's not sure he can do anything else.

~~

The chair means he can go to the store's main level. It's not a lot. It's everything. John takes immediate advantage. Nobody pays attention to him, a man in a wheelchair covered in a blanket: or rather, they all do, and look away before he can catch them staring.

The customer who just walked in, though, she actually didn't notice. Her eyes are fixed on the ground ahead, her mouth twisting, fists clenching and releasing. She walks into one of the chairs Harold keeps littered through the main floor, its metal armrest hitting her thigh with enough force to bruise. She doesn't react.

The hairs on the back of John's neck prickle. He looks around, flinching when he sees the Lament Configuration situated behind him.

John turns back around. He's between the woman and the box, no other entrance into that aisle. Who knows: maybe Harold was right after all, and John _can_ be useful, if only as a living obstacle.

The customer walks until she almost steps on John. She startles when she finally sees him, a whole body motion that nearly makes her trip over her own feet. "Sorry!" she gasps out. "Sorry." Her mouth twists again, voice shaking. "I should look where I'm going." She still mumbles apologies as she backs away. John can still hear her when she stops with those and starts berating herself. Sounds like she's got enough problems without the box.

He watches her walk away. She knocks over a stack of books. She doesn't pick them up, just steps over the pile. Maybe she has _really_ bad short term memory.

Maybe thinking about that is what draws John's eye to the shelf just next to her. He wishes he could say it was a flash of movement. It wasn't: John would have noticed that on a more conscious level. As it is, he's got nothing but a sinking sense of dread leading him to look up and see the Lament Configuration, right at her grasp.

He turns to look behind him again, clenching his teeth against the now-familiar pain in his shoulders. The box isn't there anymore.

The customer has her hands on the box when John gets to her, eyes faraway, still shiny with unshed tears. "You don't want that," John tells her.

She blinks and looks at him, then at the box. "I'm sorry. Were you going to buy it?" It's not a challenge. She offers John the box, and he just keeps from recoiling.

He smiles at her instead. "Had another one just like it. Fell apart after the first time I used it." In a manner of speaking, it did.

She gives him a wavering smile in return. "Oh. I'm not sure I even know what to do with it."

Harold materializes beside them. Only he doesn't, not really. John both heard and saw him approach, as he hadn't heard or seen the box move. If he tries to sell the woman on the box anyway....

"I'm afraid this one isn't for sale," Harold says, apologetic. "If you'll come with me, perhaps I could help find something else?"

The customer leaves the store with a book on mindfulness meditation and a tentative smile. The box lingers on the shelf, still under John's watchful eye. He waits for the store's bell to ring before turning to Harold and saying, flatly, "I saw it move."

He should probably expect Harold's rueful sigh and his, "It does that occasionally."

" _How?_ "

"I haven't the least idea, actually." Harold still looks rueful. He starts walking back to the counter.

John follows him. "You said to ask if I wanted to know something. This is me asking."

"And I haven't told you lies," Harold says. 

John follows him up to the edge of the counter. This time, when he sees the glossy black wood finish, he startles almost as violently as the customer did, letting out a grunt at the resulting sting. 

Harold's face is carefully neutral when he holds up the box. It's a different one, unadorned. When he turns it around, John can see a small _Made in Taiwan_ stamped on the bottom. "This one is only a toy," Harold says. "Or rather, it was."

John gritting his teeth has nothing to do with pain, now. "So what is it now?"

"A navigation device." Harold takes the box apart with practiced speed. As he does, the computer screen in front of him, which displays some sort of map, fills with colorful lines and dots. A particularly thick one runs diagonally across the screen. Harold frowns at it. 

If John prods too hard, he risks Harold losing his patience with him, which could mean anything from having privileges like the chair - or food - denied to being kicked out on his ass. He's willing to chance it. "What's going on?"

"The Lament Configuration." Harold's mouth is a crooked line. "It's looking for a new owner. Even accounting for its usual greed, it should have been sated. You might feel a touch of motion sickness," he adds.

Before John can ask, there's a flash of white, and an unpleasant sensation like his insides rearranging themselves. Then it's gone, and everything is the same.

No. Not everything. The aisle where John was sitting, the one where the box originally was, isn't there anymore. Instead there are two more aisles in the back. 

"If I go outside right now," John says, "what name will I see on the sign?"

"I haven't a clue," Harold says absently, still staring at the screen. "I've set up a macro to change it everywhere on each move, though I suspect my random number generator is being messed with, or perhaps I've made a hash of the hash function. Coincidences happen, but receiving the name Pigeon every time we're near Central Park seems a bit unlikely." He locks the screen. "Will you join me for a short outing?"

"Imagine me offering you my arm," John says dryly.

He doesn't know what Harold is looking for, but he knows when he finds it: a patch of red paint, about second floor height, a few yards away from the shop's entrance. He's pretty sure Harold didn't know, either.

"I'd think looking for irregularities in New York architecture gets you a lot of false positives," John says idly.

"I can see why you would, and you'd be wrong." Harold sounds equable, a touch amused. "It's all a question of cross-referencing, and experience: I have some lists of irregularities that are explained, or at least documented, and you learn to see patterns. At any rate, they're only for verification purposes. The store hasn't navigated me wrong yet."

It isn't the first time he's referred to the store as capable of independent thought. "Harold," John says. "Is the store itself an artifact?"

"Mm." Harold considers this. "Does a crowd have a mind of its own?"

John follows him in silent frustration. It occurs to him that Harold may not even be trying to be obscure: the whole situation might be so strange that Harold doesn't know where to begin explaining it.

That's all right. Not like John has a particularly busy schedule.

~~

The next day, John comes down to find a kid plucking the intro for _Stairway to Heaven_ on a battered guitar with a single line of chalk marring its side. The kid doesn't look more engrossed than any normal teenager trying to play, though, so John guesses this is one of the normal items at the store.

Just as John settles next to the window, enjoying the sun, another kid walks inside. He's making a beeline for the guitar -- wait, no. He's walking to the first kid, sitting next to him, throwing an anxious look in John's direction. "I came as soon as I got your text," the second kid says in a low voice.

The first kid's hands still on the strings. He keeps his head down, pretending to tune the guitar. "I can't see you anymore." His voice is flat. 

"Damian. Please." The second kid hitches his chair closer to Damian's. "I get that you're scared of what your dad might think, but--"

"But nothing." Damian's jaw juts, stubborn. "I can't see you again. Please leave me alone."

John steels himself to remove the second kid if he doesn't walk. Then he remembers that, oh yeah, he can't do anything about it. He settles for looking around surreptitiously for Harold. He sees him behind the counter. John wheels over, intending to ask Harold to start moving closer in case interference is needed. 

The display on Harold's screen is not the one he saw yesterday, the map and the lines drawn from artifacts. This time it's a real time security camera view of the store, with little bars hovering over the kids' heads. The counter area doesn't appear on the screen, so John can't see Harold or himself.

The bell above the door rings, and John sees the pulsing red bar above the new customer's image before he sees his face, similarly red and pulsing. "Damian," the guy growls, and Damian freezes like a deer in headlights.

The second kid tries standing between them. Damian doesn't let him, standing up and walking toward the angry man on shaky legs. "C'mon, dad," he mumbles, fidgeting with the hem of his shirt. Despite it being a hot day, he's wearing long sleeves. "Let's go home."

Damian's father narrows his eyes at the second kid, but leaves it at that. Damian winces as his father grips his forearm and turns to Harold. "I'm sorry the little rat loitered in your shop," the father says, a little stiff. "I'll be happy to buy something to make it up to you."

To John's surprise, Harold nods, and then the father has the Lament Configuration in his hands. The father squints at it. "How much does this cost?" John's surprised again to see Harold charge a price, although not a high one. Damian's father pays and drags him away. The second kid waits until they're gone to throw Harold a venomous look and leave as well.

"So I'm guessing the red bar stands for violent tendencies?" John asks.

"A combination of violent urges and violence done, yes." Harold frowns at the computer, switching to the map view. The Configuration's icon is highlighted and moving. Then he switches back and replays the footage, clicking on the bars over the father's head, showing John the breakdown. The qualities on display seem half-random - there's creativity, and violence, and greed, and a complicated bar which Harold says has to do with sexuality.

"So green means gay?" John says, looking at the kids' graphs.

Harold snorts. "Hardly that simplistic. Theirs show innocence, and some levels of guilt and, mm, complication." He glances at John. "I'm afraid I have to do some work now."

John doesn't mind leaving him alone. He wanders the store. From Harold's display, it turns out the guitar is an artifact after all. He looks at it, and the other known artifacts, and now he spots the little stickers next to them, spots of raised texture against the shelves - which are weirdly pitted around the artifacts, small hills and valley where the wood doesn't match. There's an empty spot where John remembers the red-yellow rock being before it was taken: its sticker is gone, too.

With a sigh, John wheels away and wishes for pen and paper. Or, rather, for hands that could hold them. Though come to think of that...

Behind the counter there's a dry erase board. The marker tray is fortunately at a height where John can get hold of one with his teeth, and he knocks the cork away against his shoulder. His drawing is extremely clumsy, but it'll be enough to get some of his thoughts away from his head and in order. Incoherence to anyone else would be a plus, not a minus.

Point: the artifacts move around to approach humans they want. John draws an arrow. Point: the entire store moves, which Harold controls at least partially. John draws a box around the arrow, and a smaller box inside it. Point: both the store and single items leave little reminders of themselves behind. John scatters dots inside the box. Point: Harold has sensors of some sort that let him know -- something: something that changes when a customer enters the store. John draws two little triangles (emphasis on try. They're definitely not succeed-angles) inside the box. 

The resultant mess looks like something a toddler drew, and John's not certain it helps him in getting anywhere. Okay. What does he want to know? For a start, why Harold chose to take care of him. The other questions are definitely interesting, but they're much less relevant.

Harold told him he wanted from John whatever he could do - "capable and willing", those were the words he used. People who take things from the store pay with the lives they have. John imagines how he looks from the outside and suppresses a laugh. He probably has ink stains on his lips.

He lets the marker drop. Harold clicks away on the keyboard. John waits for him to finish.

When Harold finally does turn around, John says, "Is it that you felt responsible for me?"

To his credit, Harold doesn't pretend he has no idea what John is talking about. "If I hadn't aided you, after the Configuration was finished with you, likely you'd have died very soon after."

"I know," John says, a touch irritable. "So is it that you felt responsible?"

Harold looks at him like he's speaking a foreign language. "You'd have died."

"I got that, thanks," John snaps. "Why did you help me?"

Harold raises his hand, a helpless gesture, as though surrendering. "I don't know how else to answer that question. Wouldn't you have acted to save a human being from certain death, if you knew you could?"

Now it's John's turn to feel like Harold's talking to him in a language he doesn't know. "You have those, the bar things--"

"Metrics," Harold supplies.

John tosses his head, waving that off. "You have to know I'm a killer."

Something odd happens to the shape of Harold's mouth: it wobbles briefly, then thins into a straight line. "I know you've carried out acts of violence. But that's hardly a surprise, given your previous occupation."

The barked words, "How much do you know," leave John's lips before he can think better of it.

Harold says simply, "All of it." Then he adds, "Or at least, most: I'd hardly take you in without knowing the first thing about you. You might have possessed a danger to the store, or to my customers." 

Not to Harold himself. Right now, John aches to have functioning arms and legs, that he might get up and show Harold exactly how much he has to be afraid of. "How did you find out?"

"I hacked the CIA," Harold says, matter-of-fact. 

A humorless laughter forces itself out of John's throat. "Christ. That tells you everything you should know about me, right there."

"Not everything." Harold's gaze is intent on his face. "It doesn't say how your service ended."

"I ran away," John says. The words don't want to come out. He pries them out like teeth from a dead man's mouth. "I didn't question my orders. I obeyed them, and I tried not to think too hard about what I was doing. Until I couldn't." 

It wasn't one big thing. It was a bunch of little things, one at a time, all coming to a head together. A protestation of innocence that was a little too baffled to be faked. Killing people for nothing but being someone's wife, someone's son. Suddenly John remembers one of his targets, a former terrorist who was caught by one of his own bombs, paralyzed from the neck down. John thought he was doing him a favor by killing him, felt that life confined to a bed couldn't be worth living. The irony stings. 

"We can't change the past." Harold's voice is soft. "Here and now, you're alive. What you make of that is what matters."

John swallows an instinctive bitter retort. Instead, fake-glib, he says, "Well, I won't be much of an assassin now."

Harold's eyes narrow. All he says is, "Good."

It's not until John's nearly falling asleep that he realizes he still has no idea why Harold took him in. If John believed in kindness, in innate decency, Harold would seem like a good candidate. At least until the bit where you remember he gave John a box that flayed him alive.

~~

The two girls who enter the store have expressions like embattled veterans. The one in front wears high heels with a hesitant tread that shows she's not used to them and a defiant expression that communicates that she damn well means to be.

The second wears ripped jeans and a shirt so heavy with buttons that it's a wonder the fabric holds up. Or the girl herself, who walks stooped and carries an oxygen tank in a trolley.

Behind the counter, Harold makes a small noise. Neither girl looks at him. John comes behind him, taking a look at the display. 

The first girl's metrics are nothing out of the ordinary. The second has a creativity meter that wobbles and flashes in a way John hasn't seen so far. Harold clicks on it and opens a second display with three icons. John recognizes one of these, the book with the beast on the cover. It shows a full bar. The other two show nearly empty.

"The book comes into effect if the owner dies while possessing it," Harold says, quietly. "The other two exert subtle influence over time."

Which means this display is a sign that-- "She's dying," John says, his tone matching Harold's.

It's probably no surprise to the girl. She stops just then for a burst of coughing that has John's lungs squeezing with sympathy by the end of it. Harold reaches for his pocket square, pauses, and prudently reaches for a box of tissues instead.

"Fucking gross," the girl says once she's got her breath back. "Put me down for a human shield on the next protest. Maybe people will think if they see the pigs beating down a poor sick girl." The last three words are sing-song, tinged with mockery. "If I'm gonna die, it might as well make a point."

"Anna, I wish you wouldn't talk like that," says the girl in heels, her voice tight. She glances at Anna, as if considering how obvious a lie she could get away with.

"I wish this weren't happening," Anna answers tartly. "If wishes were horses, I'd be a fucking centaur."

Heels says, "That doesn't make any sense." 

Their continued bickering is lost on John as Harold gets up, very quietly says, "I'm sorry," and turns his chair off.

Before John can protest, Harold hobbles across the store, reaching down from a shelf. John sees him taking down a sword, and he chokes.

It's not a beautiful sword. It's sheathed, so John can't see the blade, but the leather hilt is worn and the hand guard is notched. Harold carries it like it's heavy. He's carrying it in the wrong direction, away from John.

The image of his hand around its hilt so vividly he can feel it. It would flow like water in his hands, and shed blood as easily, and it won't fall from his nerveless hand until every single one of his enemies were dead. 

The throb of unset bone is nothing to the sheer wrongness that is that sword, getting farther away. John twists in the chair. He doesn't hiss or yell at the pain, can't spare the breath to do anything but writhe uselessly, aching for the weapon in Harold's grasp.

"May I interest you in a purchase?" Harold says to the girls.

"We can't really afford," Heels starts, but Anna takes the sword from him, and her face _glows_. 

At the same time, the pain finally hits John. He makes a choked noise, causing Harold to give him a quick, worried glance. John grimaces at him. He'll be okay, no thanks to Harold.

Anna, though. She's holding the sword like it weighs nothing. Now that she stands up straight, she's nearly as tall as her friend in the heels. "It's beautiful," she says, and takes it out of the sheath with a fluid motion.

The blade's notched as well, and stained. Heels says, "Is that blood?"

"I should probably caution you," Harold says. "This sword is rumored to be enchanted to give its bearer a glorious death."

"Fuck yeah," Anna breathes. Her eyes sparkle.

Heels puts herself between Anna and Harold, eyes narrowing. "Listen, Mister, I don't know what the fuck you think you're doing--"

"Come off it, Tansy," Anna says. "Glorious death beats a shitty one any day." She puts the sword back in its sheathe, buckling it across her back. There's a confidence to her stance that wasn't there before, and John's suddenly worried that she'll challenge Harold to a duel for the sword. "How much is it?"

Harold smiles enigmatically. "It's already yours."

Tansy and Anna leave quickly, the latter presumably anxious to leave before Harold changes his mind, the former hurrying after her friend. Harold returns to the counter and turns John's chair back on.

"You're a bastard," John tells him.

Harold pauses, then acknowledges this with a nod. 

That's not good enough. "Even if she means it now, she won't in a few days' time. She's young. Full of fire. When the time comes, she won't want to die, no matter how bad the alternative is."

"I know." Harold's fingertips tighten on the counter. "However, I'm afraid I'm working under severe constraints. The sword would have demanded to be chosen very soon; it's not among the greedier artifacts, but it is very insistent once it's," he hesitates, "hungry. This way, at least, I know nobody died who would have lived otherwise."

Emboldened, John says, "You still shouldn't have given it to her."

This turns out to be a mistake, since Harold turns to him with frost in his eyes. "Should I have given it to you, then? Is your death wish more noble than wanting to make the best of the inevitable?"

"That's not what I'm saying." That's a blatant lie, though, and Harold knows it for one. John swallows. "I'm sorry."

Harold looks him square in the eye. "I'm not."

~~

A sudden absence of sound tells John something's wrong. He directs his wheelchair towards the counter, where Harold abruptly stopped moving. Then he starts again. After a few moments of intense, furious clicking and typing, Harold sags in his chair. "It's done."

"What is?" John comes closer. It's the map display again, and the Lament Configuration's icon, so John hazards a guess. "Damian's dad used the box, huh?"

"So he had." Harold marshals himself with evident effort, slipping on a jacket. He looks at John and hesitates. "It's probably best that you stay here," he says. "The results are likely to be... unsettling."

John suppresses a snort. "I'll manage." If Harold doesn't want him to tag along, he can say that outright.

Harold doesn't say anything. Also, it turns out that Harold has the kind of van that transports people in wheelchairs, which John wasn't expecting. It's a nice surprise.

They arrive at a suburban house to find it looking quiet and empty. Nobody answers when Harold knocks. The door is locked. "Oh dear," Harold says, quietly. He takes his phone out.

"What are you doing?" John asks, curious.

"Calling 911." At John's unbelieving expression, Harold snaps, "I suppose you have a better idea?"

"Pick the lock." When Harold gives him a withering look, John says, "Okay, so break open the kitchen window with a rock and open the door from the inside." It's what he would've done. "Or don't, since that's likely to get us attention." If what they find in there looks like John imagines, though, it might be better if they dispose of it themselves, quiet-like.

Even before John finishes speaking, though, Harold grabs a rock and follows his suggestion. "Time is of the essence," Harold says, grim.

"Wrap the jacket around your hand before you reach inside," John says. "You don't want to get cut."

They find Damian's father - or rather, what's left of him - lying on the kitchen floor. The things from the box carved his chest open, leaving his torso looking like a complicated flower with petals made of flesh. Or... no. John blinks, and realizes he looks at someone's torso sculpted to look like a huge vagina, with his exposed heart serving as a clitoris. Wow, that's fucked up.

Then his visible lungs tremble, and the guy says, "Get out," in an awful breathy voice. It makes John fuck up his trajectory, bumping into the counter as he tries to approach and making a knife block fall to the floor.

"Mr. Barry," Harold says softly. "I'm aware that you're not at your best at the moment. You need help. Is there anyone we could call...?"

"I said get out," the guy - Barry - says. "Don't. Don't look at me."

With difficulty, Harold crouches. "Mr. Barry, I assure you--"

"No," Barry snarls. "No, fuck you, fuck all of you, I won't let you unnatural bastards touch me," and before either of them can do anything but look, he grabs one of the knives John knocked to the floor and plunges it into his own exposed heart.

Harold makes an urgent noise, reaching for Barry only to have his suit drenched with blood. The red makes his face look paler than usual. Then Harold goes creakily up to his feet, and John realizes that no, he _is_ paler than usual, his face taking on an ashen cast. He looks at Barry with enormous blinking eyes.

"We should probably clear out," John says. He's careful to speak softly, but even so, Harold jumps. "Unless you want to...."

"Unless I want to _what_ , Mr. Reese?" The question lacks Harold's usual bite. John figures he can be understanding. 

"Get rid of the body."

Harold swallows. "I. Yes. That will probably be the best course of action." He doesn't do anything about it, though, just stands there, staring awkwardly at the corpse.

John counts up to twenty in his mind. Then he says, "Harold. Look under the sink for garbage bags."

~~

He talks Harold through the messy parts, itching to just be able to do it himself rather than put it all into words, break the process down into small parts so that Harold will be able to do the same to Barry. Then they wrap all that up, drive to the shop and relocate it to a waterfront property. By then Harold has regained some of his equilibrium, though he still shakes his head as he wraps up the remainder of Barry in chickenwire and pushes it into the water. "Such a waste," he keeps saying.

"Pretty sure nobody will miss him," John says. 

Harold makes a small distressed noise. "That reminds me. I should set up a fund for his family."

Huh. "You do that every time the artifacts kill someone?"

Harold's hands tighten around the chickenwire he's carrying. "Yes," he says, pointed. "And it's hardly a habit."

 _Could've fooled me_ , John thinks, but Harold's still a little unsteady and John doesn't see a reason to be cruel. Today's already had enough of that.

Privately, John doesn't quite get why Harold, who can hold a conversation with what _looks_ like a dismembered corpse with perfect equanimity, gets so freaked out about actual dismembered corpses. Maybe of the two of them, it's John who's the more fucked up. It wouldn't be a surprise.

It's still a relief to him when Barry's remains sink out of sight, not least because of the slight relaxation in Harold's shoulders. 

"C'mon," John says. "Let's head back."

On the way back he tries to keep Harold talking, keep his mind off it. The result is a little like the world's worst game of Twenty Questions.

"What did you do before you had the shop?" John asks, and Harold says, "My job." 

"What job would that be?"

"Not one you'd care about," Harold says, repressively.

John grins. "I think you might be wrong there, Harold."

Finally, they make it back. They head upstairs immediately, and Harold moves him to the bed and gets what he needs to wash John. John goes quiet at the first touch of the washcloth. The wash is its own ritual by now, the touch of Harold's hands familiar enough that John requires no distraction from it.

Little by little, the tremors in Harold's hands subside as he moves them over John's skin. His breathing evens, too. By the time he's finished with all but the most painful parts of the task, the color in Harold's face returns to its normal state.

"You can skip the hard bits if you want," John says softly. "One night won't hurt."

Harold gives him an inscrutable look. "Do you need me to?"

John gives as much of a shrug as he can without aggravating the bone shards. 

Harold draws and exhales a long breath. "All right." Then he cleans the tops of John's thighs and his shoulders, as gentle and methodical as always. John tries his hardest not to make any sound at all.

Then he's done, and John waits for his accustomed _Good night_ when Harold hesitates.

"Go ahead," John says, when Harold doesn't move for nearly a minute.

Slowly, Harold's right hand settles over John's chest, fingers spread. Harold's eyes close. He takes even, careful breaths. 

It occurs to John that Harold shouldn't sleep alone tonight. He's on the verge of making an offer - he's not sure what kind, exactly - when Harold draws another long breath, says, "Good night, Mr. Reese," and leaves.

~~

John wakes up to find the page turner on the little lap desk that Harold arranged for him. It's the latest in a row of subtle, careful additions to the room, like the chin pad that lets John adjust the bed to sitting height, or the conveniently placed shelf where John's tablet and his button-pushing stick live.

The book in the page turner is an old, ragged copy of Asimov's _Foundation_. Not John's usual speed, but he finds himself engrossed nontheless. The book has such a _Harold_ feel to it, in a way John can't articulate, as though the pages soaked up some essence of him.

Probably he shouldn't entertain thoughts like that. Given what he knows about Harold, that idea is true in a more literal way than he wants to know. John shudders a little and reads on.

He's not so sunk in the book that he fails to notice when he turns a page to see a photograph nestled there. It seems a few years old, and it has Harold, looking rueful and enduring a sidehug from a grinning man. 

The second man is familiar. John spends a minute trying to place him before deliberately putting the thought aside and going back to reading the book. It is pretty good.

~~

The next item John sees someone going for is - of all things - a faded black-and-white photo of a cat. It's not even framed, lying discarded in a box of old pamphlets.

The girl who picks it up doesn't look more than sixteen, even under the kind of hardness your face gets after living on the streets. Her hair is dirty blond, or else just blond and dirty. She clutches the photo with trembling hands and bright eyes.

When Harold comes by, she looks up at him, defiant. "This is mine." She clutches the photo to her chest.

"I know." Harold's voice is gentle. 

She doesn't appear to hear him. Her eyes look far away. John can see track marks in her arms when they fall to the sides of her body, photo drifting away to her feet. "They took it away from me. But I remember. It was mine. It _is_ mine."

"It is," Harold agrees. With a grunt, he bends and picks up the photo, folding her fingers around it.

"What will it do to her?" John asks, once she leaves the store.

"Give her hope, and possibly a support network." Harold seems tired all of a sudden. "It will also leave her no chance of returning to sane society, but of course, she had little enough of that to begin with."

"This is hard on you, isn't it." John keeps his voice carefully sympathetic, free of surprise.

Harold's shoulders tense. "Thank you for your concern." There's an edge in his voice.

"Sane society is overrated anyway," John says. He means it, which he didn't expect.

"You would think so, wouldn't you," Harold says, but he seems obscurely cheered up. 

It makes John want to push. "How does it work?"

What he expects is a careful non-answer. Harold frowns at him, though, and disappears into the shelves. On returning, he shows John a battered-looking top hat. "Shall I?" When John nods, Harold places it on his head.

The feel of the hat is familiar, sense memory calling back friends. He remembers making the hat, measuring and cutting felt. The first time he placed it on his head. He remembers tea in small china cups, drunk with friends.

An urge swells and rises in his chest. _I have to go back there. I have to._

Then Harold takes the hat off. John blinks in the suddenly too bright lights of the store. The memories are still there, but faded, like something he read in a story book. "It wouldn't have worked," he says, coughing to clear his voice. "Not for long. It's inconsistent, and I recognize the source too easily." Hats and tea, and a blond girl with a cat. All it needs is a white goddamned rabbit.

"Mmm," Harold says. It doesn't sound like disagreement. "For some, that's the draw. This set is interesting - I currently hold the piece you just experienced, and the one I sold. I know of three more. They haven't always been linked to this particular story, from what I hear."

"It's a good match, though, for coincidence. A blond girl in a blue dress." It had been shabby and worn, but John could still see the color. 

"She was," Harold hesitated, "well-attuned to it. Some artifacts are more particular than others. The one you tested would not have chosen you."

Might as well risk one more question if Harold's chatty. "The Lament Configuration. How picky is it?"

Harold seems troubled. "Not at all, alas."

"So it's all up to you," John says, keeping his voice neutral. Harold would view any sympathy as fake, right now, and he'd be right to. "Who uses it, who doesn't. So why me?"

Even as he waits for an answer, John knows what it's going to be. Isn't it obvious? Some artifacts are hungrier, Harold said. The box must be sated. Some people are more deserving than others. If John's fingers still worked, he'd clench them into a tight fist: as it is, even flaying them apart hadn't been enough to take off the invisible stain of innocent blood.

And even supposing Harold didn't know that at the time, couldn't have known that, who would have missed John? Who would miss him now?

Harold opens his mouth, takes a breath, and sags. Then he says, "I suppose you deserve honesty. I didn't want you to die."

An ugly word stands on the tip of John's tongue. John doesn't let it out. Maybe Harold just wanted to shut John up. If he did, it was effective.

But Harold doesn't let go. He puts a hand on John's shoulder when he moves to leave. "What's wrong?"

John looks up into his eyes and sees nothing but honest confusion there. "You said you won't lie to me." The words come out terse, bitten. "I know I deserved it. Don't sugar-coat it."

Harold blinks once, twice. "Deserve isn't the word I'd use." He still sounds baffled, his voice and expression soft with it. "To be honest, it's not a word that means much to me, not any more. I took a gamble with you." A shadow passes over his face. "As I did with our latest customer. I can only hope she will react as favorably."

John doesn't answer. He probably looks like somebody slapped him with a fish.

"The Lament Configuration isn't malicious." Harold sounds matter-of-fact now, a professor lecturing to a student. "The beings tied to it don't understand malice, in our terms, any more than they understand virtue, or corruption. They have an understanding of pleasure, but one very different from the one most humans would use, and an even stranger concept of kindness."

John look down at himself. He feels numb. "You're saying they did this for my own good." A beat, and then, " _You_ did this for my own good."

"I took a chance." Harold doesn't look happy. "You had half a mind to die, when I saw you. Which is better than having your entire mind set on that end, but I couldn't know that you'd come to your senses before something irreversible happened." He spreads his arms. "Perhaps, had I not intervened, you'd have been whole and happy now. Or perhaps you'd be lying decomposing in a ditch somewhere. I couldn't risk it."

"Why not?" John bites out, because it's better than contemplating which of these options would have been more likely. 

"I saw something in you." Harold's eyes are wide and strange, luminous. They remind John of some beast from the depth of the sea, beyond the reach of sunlight. "A potential."

John wheels away instead of replying. He can't ask. He won't ask, a potential for what.

He won't ask himself whether he's more afraid that he didn't live up to that potential, or that he did.

~~

Harold doesn't really take days off. John does, though, choosing days at random to just stay in bed. He doesn't do it often: usually it happens when even Harold's quiet presence, doing something else across the room, is too much.

He browses aimlessly on his tablet, reading the news. It's a habit he's taken up recently for reasons he prefers not to think of too closely.

Turns out that he doesn't have a choice. As soon as the site loads, a popup shows, _Three dead in riot_. When he tells it to open, it shows grainy pictures of two cops. No footage found of the third death, Anna McKay, age 16, with a history of shoplifting and resisting arrest. 

Instead of reading further, John takes a look at the popup itself. The title is _swrdsrc.add_. "Show sword search add on," John says, feeling a little stupid.

The tablet obeys, though, opening up a list of articles. The list starts out spaced evenly in terms of date, an article every two years. Then about five articles down, it becomes more erratic. 

John scrolls to the bottom. The first article is dated from September 12th, 2001. Three days after Harold Wren's disappearance. The title says, _CEO of IFT Killed Preventing Hijacking_ ; on opening the article, John blinks at the picture. Nathan Ingram, aged 46, whom John has last seen hugging Harold in an old picture, apparently died ten years ago while saving the flight he was on from being hijacked by terrorists.

"He always wanted to be a hero," Harold says softly from his side. John's not startled. Even without paying conscious attention, he was aware of the sound of the elevator moving, of Harold's steps. 

Harold's got that ashen look on his face again. John's guessing he isn't the only one who's been keeping up with the news.

"You must miss him," John says.

For a brief moment, Harold's gaze goes unfocused. "Very much." 

IFT used to be on the cover of magazines, a tech company whose unofficial slogan was "Making science fiction into reality". It seems a much more likely background than a boring insurance company for someone who wrote, over the course of a few evenings, the voice control interface John used. Not to mention whatever calculated the customers' metrics and the store's navigation system.

"You had to have been close," John says. "Or else you wouldn't have let him pretend to run your company."

"We were." Harold stares at the screen unblinking.

That at least explains Harold's wealth. The money IFT earned was enough to keep several countries afloat - not even necessarily small ones. 

Harold takes a shuddering breath. "After Nathan's death, I was-- indisposed, for a while; then, I became obsessed. With finding the sword, and the store at which we'd purchased it."

"This store?"

"No, but very similar to it." Harold pauses. "We were walking down the street. An unusual exercise for us at the time; we had cars and drivers to take us anywhere we wanted to go. But Nathan needed a change of pace, so to speak, and so did I.

"I grew up poor, and I never believed one could want a respite from being rich. Yet I did - we both did. The responsibility of it weighed on Nathan, and boredom weighed on me. It seemed like there was nothing more worth achieving. It was all so easy." Harold's hand starts clenching, then abruptly goes limp. "Nathan went right for the sword. You should have seen his face, holding it. The last time I'd seen him look like that, he was holding his newborn son."

It seems like Harold's in danger of getting lost in the past, so John prods gently. "So how did you find the store?"

Harold blinks. "Well. At first, I went to the physical location as soon as I was able, but a long time had passed. I wasn't surprised to find it wasn't there anymore. I felt some more surprise when I couldn't find records of it having been there at any point, but not much. I was suspicious even as, as Nathan purchased the item."

John doesn't narrow his eyes at the barely-there, uncharacteristic pause in Harold's speech. Possibly Harold's just upset.

"The sword vanished after Nathan died - not only physically, but from witness recollections. The plane's black box, however, proved edifying. There were certain elements to the story that I could track, and based on them, I wrote the prototype to the software you've just used.

"I found the store first, though. The proprietor didn't recognize me when I entered: I don't have the most memorable face, and I was," Harold swallows, "changed. I asked to buy the whole place and its inventory, down to the paperclips. He refused. I insisted.

"I found myself outside later with little recollection of what passed. In my pocket, when I looked, I saw a journal bound in fine, soft leather, with a gripping beast embossed on the cover. Inside, there were code snippets - in my own style - which ended up forming the core of my navigation and metrics systems. To give credit's where it's due," Harold cracks a small smile, "I consider myself quite an accomplished programmer, but without those, I never would have managed. These were the parts responsible for identifying artifacts. Even having worked with them for years, I still have only the faintest idea of how they work. My attempts at reverse engineering them have all failed."

Huh. "That doesn't bother you?" John says.

Harold gives a very small shrug. "To a degree. Less than it should, probably. To be perfectly honest, I'm an engineer. I care more about whether things work than I do about why." He looks momentarily preoccupied. "Of course, that necessitates some knowledge on how to operate, not to mention a good definition of what _work_ means...."

An interesting conversation, but John wants to get the most out of Harold while he's in a sharing mood. "So did you ever get revenge on that seller?"

Harold's eyebrows draw up. "I didn't. That wasn't why I sought him out. Once I'd perfected the system, I tracked him down and showed it to him. He wasn't unethical, and the way he came upon the store wasn't that different from my own circumstances. He merely needed assurance that I wouldn't use it or the artifacts to cause unnecessary hurt to anyone, especially him or his loved ones. Once he understood why I wanted it, he was perfectly willing to sell."

Barely daring to voice the question, John says, "So why did you want it? What were you going to do with it?"

"The best I could," Harold says simply. 

The shop's bell rings, signaling a customer. Harold startles. "I better go down," he tells John, apologetic. 

Soon John is left alone once more, staring at the tablet. His head feels like a weirdly empty, open space where questions used to be. He wants to say he doesn't really understand Harold's last reply, but at the same time he gets it, sort of.

According to Harold, he'd been bored. Whatever Harold is now, bored isn't it. Before Harold found him, John had seen only one way in the world, and walking it seemed just the tiniest bit more bearable than stepping off. Now he is living a life he couldn't have imagined back then, and literal magic is only the smallest, least significant part of that.

Being dead means you can't change your mind about anything, or learn anything new. Maybe that's why death seems to be the only thing capable of freaking Harold out.

John's roused out of this line of thought by rising voices from downstairs. 

"What do you mean, you won't sell it to me?" 

John's muscles seize with a sudden call to action. The ensuing pain robs him of his breath. Trapped in bed, he can only listen to Harold growing more and more agitated, telling the customer, "The Lament Configuration is an extremely rare item, and it's not for sale."

"I fucking know what it is," the customer says, and then there's a sickening, meaty sound, and footsteps rushing away.

~~

Finally, about a thousand years later, Harold comes up to John, armed with a laptop. He's got the beginning of a black eye and a grim look on his face, and apparently he's been using the time since John last saw him productively.

The thief is named Keith Pye, and until lately he shared an apartment with one Laura Macaulay. "She has a new solo rental agreement dating two months ago," Harold says, his fingers easy on the keyboard.

It's pretty easy to surmise what Pye means to do with the Lament Configuration. Finch paces with growing agitation. "I could show up at his doorstep," he says, "but I'd doubt he'll listen to me any more than he did when he came to the shop. Or call the police."

"For what, possession of a magical artifact?" John isn't actually enjoying throwing wrenches into Harold's works. "This won't work, Harold. You can't help her. The sooner you let it go, the better."

"Better for whom?" Harold asks, tone caustic.

If John could, he'd throw his hands up. As it is, he says, "Look, wishing's not going to help. It has about as much point as saying that if I had working limbs, I'd go there and scare him off myself."

Harold stops his pacing and looks at John. "Would you?"

"Yeah." John drawls the word out. "And if pigs could fly, we'd have one hell of a street cleaning problem."

Harold doesn't rise to it. "Follow me, please." He turns into the door behind the counter. 

John follows. He hasn't been in this room much. It's dusty, full of paperwork, small and cramped. Not the easiest place to navigate in a wheelchair. Harold makes his way to the desk, unlocks a drawer, and takes out a box.

It could be the twin of the Lament Configuration, except that instead of gold, it's marked in silver. On second look, the markings themselves are different: the ones John can see here seem almost like a circuit board. "The Life Configuration," Harold says, quietly. "Or it will be, I hope, when I finish it."

John's mouth is dry, his heart beating hard in his chest. He can't take his eyes off the box.

"I've worked on it, on and off, since acquiring the journal. It lead me to the initial design, which calls the same beings as the Lament Configuration, and invests the Configuration's owner with their skill. And," Harold blanches, "some of their temperament. Unfortunately."

Somehow, John regains the ability to speak. "So it turns you into a monster. Great."

"A monster? Hardly." Harold frowns at him. "For one thing, the beings aren't malicious. Primarily they care about -- art. Aesthetics. Our medicine, to them, looks unspeakably ugly, patches on top of patches.”

“How do you know that?” John says.

Harold either ignores or doesn’t heat him. ”I thought I would be able to replicate their skill to use in healing by finding solutions that would be both elegant and satisfactory from an end point user's view--"

"You mean, the person whose body you're taking apart."

"Yes." Harold agrees readily, without so much as batting an eyelash. "But it isn't done. There are certain," he takes a breath, "flaws with the exit condition."

With a growing sense of dread, John waits for Harold to make sense.

"Thus far, to comply with their aesthetics, the body has to be significantly changed from the human norm in both form and function. Until the," Harold twitches slightly, "creation meets their definition of artistic merit, the holder of the box remains... inhabited."

John registers this. He swallows. "I need to think about it."

Harold nods. "I'd tell you to take all the time you need, but...."

Without another word, John wheels away.

~~

In his room, John sits next to the window. He can't pace - can't so much as tap his fingers. It's been a while since the frustration of his current state bothered him so much.

Then he stops, exhales, and goes back to the main floor. He goes to Harold's little office, and he tells him, "Do it."

Harold looks up at him, eyes wide, his hand trembling on the lid of the silver box. 

"Before I change my mind," John says, voice harsh.

At that, Harold nods once, and sets to unlocking the box.

There's something fascinating about watching Harold do it. John doesn't think it's supernatural, or really anything but the hypnotic pleasure of watching someone very skilled do something very complicated. 

The box unfolds like a flower before Harold's fingers, its panels sliding and falling into place. Then Harold twists, and pulls, and twists a little more, and it opens, and then--

There's just Harold. Who raises his eyes up to look at John, and smiles, slow and wide, and it isn't just Harold after all. "Hello," Harold says, in a voice that isn't quite his own. "We've worked on you before."

John has no idea how to respond to that. _Nice seeing you again_ doesn't quite cover it. Good thing Harold doesn't seem to expect a response. Instead he looks at John critically, and takes the blanket off him.

It's weird to have Harold look at him, _really_ look. John has a brief urge to cover his crotch. He squares his shoulders instead and asks, "Yeah?"

Harold smiles at him again, but this time it's Harold's smile, small and sweet and infinitely sincere. "Yes," he tells John, and then he sets to work.

It hurts just as much as it did the first time around. Possibly more so, since now it's just one being working on him, rather than a whole group, so it takes longer. And yet it's not the same: there's little of the visceral horror John remembers, none of the sheer wrongness he'd felt. The touch of Harold's hand is achingly familiar, even if now it's bracing him while Harold cuts the skin of his arm open rather than simply wiping him clean.

Harold's done plenty of things that hurt him since he came here, but he's always done exactly what he said he will, and it was always for a reason John agreed with. This is just more of the same.

Watching Harold take him apart has a touch of the same fascination he felt watching him work the box open, too. Now that he knows what's happening, that he knows he won't be killed or left to die, he can take more of an active interest in the process. 

It helps, too, that Harold narrates as he goes along. "I really wish I could have offered you more chances for activity," he says, wistfully, as he cuts John's fingers to put them back together. "You've lost considerable muscle tone."

"Can't be helped." John gasps on the last word, then clenches his jaw as Harold delicately manipulates nerves into place.

"Oh, but it can." Harold blinks up at him, then steps away. "I'll need a moment."

John has never seen Harold wear anything less than a full three-piece suit, even when John summoned him in the middle of the night. He started believing Harold slept in the damned things. Now Harold is taking off his jacket, hanging it off his chair, and unbuttoning his vest.

As Harold takes his clothes off, a discomfort rises in John that has nothing to do with the fact that his hands are flayed open and half reassembled. 

It's actually a relief when Harold unbuttons his shirt to show that he has no skin from collarbone to hip, muscle and fat and sinews all exposed. A little round opening in his rib cage shows his heart beating inside a transparent box, his lungs draped to the sides of it. A bone marble sits in his bad hip, forming a question mark with Harold's twisted spine.

"Do you like our work?" Harold says conversationally. Or the being inhabiting him does. "It's a shame that he hides it like this. We're very proud of it: he was on display for a long time."

The idea of Harold, who keeps secrets instinctively, being on display almost makes John bite his tongue.

Then he really does it, when Harold bends and cuts himself further, paring a strip of muscle off his own thigh to graft it onto John's arms. "This isn't very elegant at all." Harold sounds just like he does when he's fussing about the particular order in the shop. "Still, it'll have to do. Hm. Perhaps I should start from the legs and work upwards." 

They wind up with John on the desk, Harold's clothes relegated to the floor, and Harold in John's own motorized chair. it's becoming more and more necessary as Harold cannibalizes himself for parts with which to fix John up, not showing any response that John can recognize.

"Doesn't it hurt you?" John grunts eventually, frustrated.

"I trust you don't mean the shoddy design?" Harold frowns over him. At least the words are a minor distraction from him cutting the bone fragments out of John's thighs. "No, we feel the pain. It's interesting." He drops a bone shard on the desk. "The original inhabitant does feel rather upset, but even he doesn't mind very much, since it's for you."

That leaves John speechless until the last stitch is tied up, and Harold - or whatever's currently using Harold's mouth to speak - bids him a cheerful goodbye, and an only slightly menacing, "We'll be waiting for you when you get back."

~~

Two hours later find John in Pye's house with the latter unconscious on the floor and the Lament Configuration in the former's hands. He's not quite sure what to do now.

Logic - _sanity_ \- would dictate that he should run. Going back would mean another vivisection, a new and probably even more horrifying form, and giving up this freedom that he just regained. 

Running would mean that Harold would be permanently possessed by something so monstrous that it didn't even understand how horrifying it was, and leaving that thing in charge of the store and its artifacts.

To complicate matters, Pye is waking up. "Ugh."

John bends down, puts his hand ( _His hand!_ some part of his brain marvels) over Pye's mouth, and says, "So if I were you, I'd rethink this little plan."

Pye doesn't say anything, but his eyes look up at John, bright and not cowed in the slightest, despite the blood running from the cut in his cheek. 

_He's not going to give up,_ John realizes. Then his eyes land on the box.

Making Pye work the configuration isn't hard. All John has to do is sit him next to the table and lay it in front of him. A kitchen knife against the back of his neck keeps Pye in place, which to John says he doesn't have a very good imagination.

Then again, knowing what he does, John wouldn't choose death over the box, either.

The beings the box calls aren't all the ones John remembers seeing, and his insides shudder to look at them. It's a comfort, actually, to know that something in him can still be shocked. And he's doing better than Pye, who just wet his pants.

Watching the beings work on Pye is slightly nauseating in a way John's most recent transformation wasn't. He remembers being where Pye was, the helplessness of it, the fear, the _wrongness_. Pye doesn't see it the way John does, from the outside.

They give Pye extra vertebrae, so he can bend in a complete circle, and stitch his arms to his sides in a permanent hug. They carve a hole between Pye's balls and his asshole, and use the flesh to elongate his penis at the base, then plug that into the hole. 

_So he's never lonely like this again_ , John thinks. One of the beings raises its head up. It has nails in its eyes, but John still has the feeling it's winking at him.

Then they're done and gone, and Pye lies crying on the floor. "Is there anyone I can call for you?" John says.

"Laura." Pye whimpers. "Laura."

"She's not coming back," John tells him, not without sympathy. 

Slowly, Pye nods, his crying shifting into something low and continuous. At last, he says, "Tom. I want Tom."

John finds the name on Pye's last-called list, sends a message and waits behind the curtains until he hears a young man scream, "Holy fucking shit!" Then he waits until he hears something like conversation, and shuffling, and sneaks off while the two are distracted.

~~

He comes back to find the shop dark. For a moment, John is certain that Harold moved the store and now John will never find it. Then he spots the sign and breathes out, relief hollowing out his chest to make room for itself.

It's Harold's sweet smile that greets him, but the surprised expression is too unguarded to be his. "You came back."

"Yeah." John swallows. He puts the box down and starts taking off the clothes Harold gave him.

"We're glad," Not-Harold murmurs. "You're a joy to work with, I hope you realize." 

"Am I." John desperately wants to close his eyes against the first cut. He doesn't. Not-Harold keeps rolling the chair closer, and John is struck by an awful thought. "You'll give him all his parts back, right?"

"Of course." Not-Harold runs his hands up John's leg like he's sizing him up for a suit. "Now, please be still." Then they're done talking, at least for a while.

It hurts. It hurts a lot. John keeps his eyes on Not-Harold's hands, keeps his breathing as even as possible. 

At first he thinks it's a hallucination brought on by pain, but little by little, the touch changes. There's something about the eyes, too, a manic gleam that fades into concern, and then into horror. "John," Harold says, and it is definitely Harold. 

"I'm sorry," John says helplessly. He can't move his arms anymore, or his legs. Harold is still working on him, still not done. 

"I thought you might escape." Harold doesn't look away from where he's working, mouth set in a determined line.

"Couldn't." Then Harold does something and John's unable to keep from hissing. 

"Oh, John." 

The sorrow in Harold's voice is worse, the only unbearable thing in this night of horrors. "Look at me," John says, and even as he lets himself think it for the first time, says, "I didn't want to."

For a moment, everything is still. 

John breaks the silence saying, "Thank you."

Harold makes an inarticulate noise. "For what?"

"What I did tonight. That means that what happened to Pye," _to you,_ John doesn't say, or _to me_ , "that means it didn't happen to Laura. I'm glad he's the one who triggered the box, if it had to happen."

Harold's hands are still on John's skin. "Because he deserved it?"

John shakes his head, just a little bit. He doesn't have a lot of a range of motion at the moment. "If it were up to me, I'd've killed him. I didn't know any other way to make someone like him _stop_. But I didn't have to. I think I helped, and you gave me a chance to do that. So thanks."

"John," Harold says in a new voice altogether. His hands slide on John's body in a way that he now recognizes as proprietary, and Harold's mouth is soft and close when John says, "Kiss me."

Harold does, sliding a thumb down John's cheek. "Thank _you_ ," he says, and, "I'll take such good care of you."

When he resumes his work, John's cries of pain are high and rapturous, and Harold replies, "I know," in hushed tones to each one.


End file.
